UK’s hierarchy of accents: ‘I thought mine made me sound stupid’

Before she started university, Beth Beddall had never really thought about her Black Country accent.
But when she started attending seminars during her undergraduate course at Durham University in 2022, she began to feel self conscious, and avoided speaking up in front of the other students.
Beth, from Sandwell in the West Midlands, recalls a privately-educated student once telling her: “You don’t sound like you’re from a private school.”
When she replied telling him she went to a state school, he said: “You must be intimidated by us and how we speak.”
Like Beth, many university students have high levels of accent-based anxiety, according to a 2022 report on accents and social mobility by sociolinguists for the Sutton Trust.
More than a third of over 1,000 university students surveyed said they felt self-conscious about their accent, and 47% said they’d had their accent mocked, criticised or commented on in a social setting.
“In first year, I missed a lot of seminars and workshops because I was so scared to go in and actually have to give an opinion on something because I always felt what I was going to say was going to be wrong,” the 21-year-old says. “A lot of it did come down to the accent.”